Ice Living

Life in McMurdo is extraordinarily unique and familiar at the same time. As I live and work here, I think to myself “I know this.” It’s college all over again: living in dorms with strangers, eating in dining halls buffet-style, having no commute to speak of. People wander the halls in flip-flops and towels, subtle tensions rise and subside in living arrangements that have multiple people sleeping on different schedules in confined spaces, and some rooms seem perpetually open to a revolving door of folks watching TV, playing video games and partying.

And yet it’s not college. Not by a long shot. We are here to work. Our responsibility is to our jobs, and if we fall too short of the expectations, we are unceremoniously escorted back to the world. The leash is tighter here than in college, and the hours are longer. Underneath it all is a general feeling of greater individual responsibility (though it’s sometimes lost by those individuals who actually think this is still college, but they are the minority). So when I’m at the bar or a social event, there is revelry and camaraderie and all that comes with time off after a long day, but it’s tempered by the fact that tomorrow we can’t just skip class and sleep away the hangover.

So we live like we’re in college, and work like we’re in the real world, and the two combine to make something different that is nothing more than what I’ve already known.

My room is designated to house four people, and four people it is housing. When I first arrived at McMurdo there was only one person living in there. He had lived in McMurdo throughout the winter, and had had the room to himself during that time, allowing him to arrange the room as he saw fit. The room is ‘divided’ into two halves, the sleeping half – where all the dressers and beds exist – and the living half – with two tv’s, two mini-fridges and some seating options.

It’s an optimal arrangement for one person: there’s a lot of space for hosting people, and a nice little corner to sleep. But there is minimal privacy if several people are living there. Within 10 days of my arrival, the remaining beds had been filled in. What was a great design for one person is, at best, passable for four: as our schedules begin to change, the people working the night shift sleep during the day, and we each get different days off during the week. As a result, the ability to host other people in the living area declines, and the desire for privacy to sleep uninterrupted increases.

I’m lucky that all three of my roommates seem to be considerate folks. Two weeks into our cohabitation and each tries his best to be quiet and keep the lights off when he suspects others are sleeping. No one has stumbled home loud and drunk; no one has noisily dressed or cranked up the TV volume in the morning. I am pretty sure that at 27 I am the youngest, though I wouldn’t peg the oldest (the winter-over) at older than 45. He’s tall and somewhat lanky, and you can tell that as the sole occupant over the winter, the invasion of his space by us summer workers has made him less comfortable. He handles is well though. The other two are of a similar age to one another – perhaps early 30’s – average height, strongly built with rough facial hair to augment the impression of being outdoorsmen. When I see them separately, I have to think very carefully which is which, though in the room together the mistake is hard to make.

For now we get along well and see no need to rush changes in deference to the veteran of the room. Still, I suspect that once the winter-over leaves (in mid November) we will reorder the room from its current sleeping half – living half design to, perhaps, four individual sleeping corners. Almost certainly the beds will be unbunked, and a couch will be removed.

We live in a hall with a dozen similar rooms as well as community bathrooms, and four such halls comprise the second floor. Down on the first floor there are a few more dorms, but many more community facilities. Washers and dryers sit across from computer kiosks. A craft room sits in one hall next to a hairdresser and a gear issue sits down another. There is the general store, with its everyday items, $6 six-packs, and souvenirs.

Along with the coffee house and bars, this store is the only place where money can be spent. Everything else, from food to laundry, library books, movie rentals and haircuts is free. There’s even a community “Goodwill” store, called skua, where past travelers leave behind the items they no longer want. Everything in it is free to whomever desires it. Skua doesn’t have the same clean organization as the general store, nor the predictability, but a variety of useful and useable items passes through it to help augment a new McMurdan’s clothes or room.

What about food? The galley is also located on the first floor of my dorms. Here, the majority of the 1000+ population gets feed, with exceptions for the airfields which have their own small galley’s.

Truly, the food variety is remarkable. Each meal typically has a selection of hot foods, a selection of cold foods and a selection of baked goods. Depending on the meal, there is also a sandwich chef, or an omelette chef, or a meat carver. Below are my plates for a Sunday brunch and a weekday dinner.

Delicious looking right? Especially considering that everything has to be flow in from off continent and has to be made for hundreds and hundreds of people. It takes everything in my power not to overeat each and every meal – right now it’s only every other meal or so. Each meal is different, and while some meals are better than others, rarely is there nothing the looks particularly good. Really, I can think of only one meal that I looked at and despaired…

…and then I tried the salmon pasta bake anyway and enjoyed it.

I’m told that in past years the food has been pretty abysmal. Going into the season, people were warning me about the perils of trying to get enough sustenance when all of it made you gag. The crisis culminated last year when entire weeks went by with little or no fresh food and people going straight for the fake-ice cream machine, frosty-boy, which often was the sole bright spot in the galley. But this year, with a new head chef and an increased budget for fresh food (reverently referred to as ‘freshies’), everyone is raving about the increased quality. As someone who at times can be a bit… picky… with his food, it seems I chose a good year to come. 

Other thoughts:

I have been transitioning to the night shift for the past few days. Pragmatically, what this means is I have two days off to shift my internal clock by 12 hours. But I’m much more interested in the response my body is going to have to this change. I’ve always been a night person, happy to sleep late into the day and then stay up until almost sunrise. Conversely, getting up in the morning has always been one of the harder tasks in my everyday life. But now what will happen in a land that has no end to daytime? Even though it is the night shift, there will never be any darkness. Will my body still treat this time as daytime – perhaps analogous to the near-horizon passages of the sun in winter days back home – or will it still acknowledge that I am running on a fundamentally different schedule than those around me? I suppose the question is: am I a night person because of physiological (lack of sun) reasons, or psychological (lack of people) reasons?

It was asked that I get  all the vehicles I drive in the same photo to better gauge their relative sizes. Bam.

Tools of the Trade

It is an endlessly stereotyped mantra of corporate America: you, as a worker, are part of a whole; a gear in the machinery; a cog in the wheel. For the system to work, you have to do your part, and no matter how insignificant you may think your part is, if you do not do it, everyone will be set back because of it. Hyperbole? Absolutely. But the idea does touch on a key point here at McMurdo (even though it may not be true back in the states), which is that each and every job here exists because it is important. Every person at McMurdo is employed for the sole purpose of supporting scientific research on the harshest continent in the world. There is no other reason for being here. The NSF grantees, the construction workers, the shuttle drivers and the dining attendants all work to advance the knowledge of mankind. Even though the company that employs us (Raytheon) is here for the money, at the very top this venture has no profit motive.

My little part to play in this adventure is as a shuttle operator. My job can be broken down into several aspects, but at its core I am a taxi driver, driving people and their supplies around McMurdo, to the airplane runways and to the nearby science stations. Like most employees at McMurdo, I am housed at a building that is meant to be functional and nothing more:

 This warehousy-looking building is as 140. It’s home to the shuttles department. It also houses the air services department, all of cargo handling, the central supply room and the mail room. If you follow me I’ll take you on a tour of the little corner reserved for shuttles. Up those stairs and through the door in the white patch you’ll enter our building’s welcoming lobby

Cushy, huh? When people arrive at McMurdo, the cargo department unloads the luggage into this area, and passengers can pick it up and be driven to their dorms (by us!). The shuttles office is the door to the left. No, not the door you can see, that’s the ladies’ room. Our door is to the left of that one, mostly obscured by the cubby-holes. No matter, I’ll show you in.

And if you come with me to the other end of the room, we can turn around and see where we’ve been.

Thanks for taking the tour!

We don’t exactly have a lot of space to work with. We also have 27 shuttle drivers, so fitting even half of them into our office is a tight fit, but it can be done in a pinch. Of course, most of the time most of the drivers are out in vehicles doing tasks about town, so office space isn’t a high priority. Our jobs range from being town courier, to shuttling people to the runway, to taxiing people around town and out to various field stations. At the heart of the operation is the dispatcher, keeping track of all the drivers currently on shift, what vehicles they’re driving and where they are. Here we can see Shuttles Mike working hard at it.

You can see around Mike many of the things he’s responsible for. Right now he appears to be taking a call, recording a taxi run and composing an email message for a vehicle heading into an area that requires authorization. Oh, and he’s probably listening to the dispatch radio for updates on road conditions or driver status-es. Basically, he takes in information from emails, the radio, the phones and the flight boards, and dispenses tasks to the drivers via the radio and the Big Board, which tells where every driver and every vehicle we have are at any given moment. 

Dispatcher is a high-pressure task. It is simultaneously awesome and nerve racking. Multi-tasking is an essential skill, and I can thank all those video games I played growing up for being able to juggle those tasks, micromanage effectively and adjust on the fly. The part  that kills me is dividing my attention. As a dispatcher, I have to sometimes be taking a phone call, listening to a flight report on the radio and telling a driver where I need him to go at the same time. Oh, and often there are 6 or 7 other people in the office who may be having other conversations. Anyone who knows me knows I am terrible at focusing on voices in the crowd, and dividing my attention in general, so this part of dispatching is going to prove to be the most challenging.

But dispatching is only one task. And as I said before, most of our time is spent with our vehicles. Let me show you our fleet. We have 17 vans

3 airporters

3 deltas

Ivan the Terra Bus

And 2 prototype vehicles, which are useless without their comically long trailers

The prototypes have a funny story, at least if you consider $4 million dollar prototypes that have been sitting unused for months and months funny. Effectively, they have proven unable to pull themselves and their trailers up hills, and their designers are… reluctant… to send a troubleshooter to figure out why. So for now they languish as roadside derelicts, and are the target of many unflattering comments by passers-by.

Ivan, on the other hand, is a beast. It holds 50+ people and is so unwieldy that a special position, Heavy Vehicle Operator, exists for people qualified to drive it. Alas, I am not one of those people, so I do not get to operate Ivan. I DO get to operate the deltas, though, and they are a nice consolation prize. They hold 20 passengers, are mini-beasts, and have articulating midsections which allow a driver to make absurdly tight turns. They are a handful to drive, but a lot of fun as well. Their big drawback is that they are not a particularly smooth ride, as captured in this cartoon:

Since we’re still in training, I’ll save talking about our job tasks for another day (i.e. once I have a better idea of what they’re like), but these are the places and vehicles I’ll be doing those tasks in.

Other thoughts:

–It has taken me almost two weeks to understand why my sense of direction has failed me and why I’m always confused about where the sun is. Being so close to one of the Earth’s pole, I knew that darkness would never really fall during my time here. And I also knew that a much larger fraction of the horizon would find the sun above it: in the states, the sun rises in the vicinity of east and sets in the vicinity of west, spanning a little over 180 degrees of horizon as the day unfolds. But near the pole, even before everlasting daytime, I came expecting closer to 270 degrees (75%) of the horizon to have the sun passing over it. What confused me was how every morning the sun seemed to rise in what I thought was roughly the easterly direction, but moved northerly instead of southerly in its trip across the sky.

Of course, that exactly what’s supposed to happen: I’m in the southern hemisphere! The sun traverses the southern half of the sky in the U.S. because the U.S. is in the northern hemisphere. Now that I’m in Antarctica, after the sun rises it swings around the northern half of the sky. This took me 2 weeks to work out… and I’m supposed to be an astronomer.

— While most of the experience has been enjoyable, there is one incredibly irksome thing that I have to complain about: my useless friggin’ smartphone-turned-mp3 player. It holds a whopping 8 GB of data which I gleefully filled with music, dreaming of hooking it up to an FM transmitter and blasting tunes during my long drives. Having dumped over half of my laptop’s library there, I set about organizing playlists so that I had my options open depending on my mood and the audience in the vehicle (I don’t want to be offending anyone’s potentially delicate sensibilities). But I noticed a strange phenomenon: sometimes my phone would complain about being unable to play a song which it had just successfully played.

No problem, right? I mean, I have something on the order of 5 continuous days worth of music stored, so a missing song here or there I can live with. Sadly, it’s worse than that: huge chunks (90%) of the library go missing seemingly without reason, and when they do my playlists – and all the time and effort put into organizing them – go as well. If I can’t get this fixed, it could be a very big pain in my neck.

Next week: Dorms ‘n Dining

On the Ice

After a week of life down at the bottom of the world I feel like I’m getting adjusted. I’m learning on the fly at work, which is a real challenge, but so far I’ve managed to retain a good chunk of what I’ve been taught. I’ll go more into that in another post, as I will about life, society and everything else that’s happening here. But that is all for later.

Stepping off the plane was amazing, and now that I’ve been here to see the reaction of other people as they arrive, I feel like I appreciate it more. When we disembarked, we were in the middle of nowhere. There were a few vehicles around, a cargo crate or two and a mass of people in exodus, but out across the horizon there was a vast open expanse. I imagine it would be kind of like standing in Tucson if it were still uninhabited desert, with vast expanses of land ending at distant mountains, but even more barren. The plane literally lands on the sea. Of course, it is frozen over and 6 or 7 feet thick, but there is such openness. We are isolated out in the middle of nowhere.

You can tell from the vehicles they have at the runway that they don’t screw around when it comes to driving in Antarctica. If it moves, it has a ton of clearance, and is made for moving through soft ground.

 The veterans of shuttles say that there will still be a lot of getting stuck as the season progresses. The temperature when I arrive is a breezy, balmy 20 degrees, but in the days to come it will get stuck around the single digits, and dive as low as -13 degrees with a wind chill of -38. It won’t stay that way though. With 24 hours of light brings enough energy to heat up to freezing or above, and even if the ambient temperature is below freezing, the sun’s rays will melt the snow and make driving messy.

But that is all for later. For now, the world is a bitterly frozen one, but still breathtaking to behold. And getting over the initial moments of taking in this place, I can see in the distance my home for the next few months. Far, far across the ice and tucked away on the side of a mountain is this settlement which belongs in some hobbyist’s basement, surrounded by model train sets. It certainly seems too quaint to be an outpost on the edge of civilization.

The drive from the airport to town is perhaps 15 minutes. The welcome talk is an hour. And then, we’re released. To be honest I have no idea where to go or what to do, but following everyone else seems like the correct survival strategy. We head to 155, the heart of the living quarters, to pick up bedsheets. My room is somewhere in the building too, along with the dining hall, library, general store.

But that is all for later. For now, I have to go get my bags, which are being unloaded in the same building where I will start working the following day. Once again, the lemming approach seems prudent, and I make my way there with little difficulty. Turning back, I can see out over the town, across the frozen sea and to the distant mountains of the continent itself.

 With my bags in my room and unpacked enough to make it another 24 hours, I have just enough time to explore a little bit before it’s time for bed. I find myself on the far side of the base where they are building the ice pier. Layer upon layer of water is sprayed onto the surface, allowed to freeze, and sculped into one, massive block of ice. Three months from now, an icebreaker – the one whose near-absence could have cost me my job –  will come plowing through the ice, and the cargo ship that follows will pull to the far side of the pier. For a week, cargo will be unloaded onto this pier of frozen water and trucked into town constantly, 24 hours a day, until it’s all delivered. For now, a lone loader or two prowls the perimeter, making sure the ‘construction’ is proceeding apace.

 Days later, I make my way to an overlook of the town. This is my home for a while. A bleak and beautiful place.

It’s picture time. While I’ve been here for a day and a half, and a ton of stuff has been thrown at me, I want to step back a minute and chronicle my trip here in pictures. It started in Denver, where I spent two days at orientation:

Raytheon Polar Headquarters

The folks there were friendly, helpful and everyone, both new and returning, where excited to be there. Here was our greeting:

After orientation, we had our marathon flight to Christchurch. Once there, one of my favorite things I can across was this Indian restaurant, which clearly used to be a gas station in it’s previous life. I ended up eating here for dinner, and it was quite good (though I am no expert on Indian food)

Indian Restaurant in Christchurch

The next day we got our Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear at the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center). There we tried on all our clothing to make sure it fit and was in good shape. If it wasn’t we were able to exchange it. I asked for size L jackets, shirts and parkas, but they all turned out to be a bit small so I went to XL. Much better. The CDC, once emptied, looked like this (the orange bags were where all our ECW was stuffed):

Decked in my sexy parka and overalls, I looked something like this:

The parka (as with all the gear) really is extreme cold weather. I love it. It promises to keep me warm even in pretty bad conditions. The downside is that it is ridiculously bulky, so once it warms up a bit I may stow it away for smaller things. Speaking of weather, next up is a graph! It shows how my local high temperature has changed over the past few days as my journey has progressed.

Once we were geared up and ready to head down, they loaded us into a C-17 which had been modified to carry about 100 people. The interior looked like this:

We were delayed for about on hour while weather passed through McMurdo, but we were soon on our way. The flight was loud, but we had earplugs which muffled the sound well. 5 hours later, we landed at the bottom of the world. Unfortunately, I can’t post the video here, but you can find it on my facebook page. Let me know if you have trouble viewing it and I will try to upload it to youtube.

Marathon Day

Raytheon Polar Services – 6 hours

The past two days have been spent in training. Orientation may be the more apt term, because we haven’t really learned how to do anything. Laptops have passed IT screenings, jobs benefits have to overviewed, safety and environmental protection have been discussed. There’s a lot there. I’d estimate 10% of it is truly important, 50% is not and 40% is one of those first two categories explained in a different way. The problem is that it is hard to tell where any piece of information falls. So I have a lot of useless information in my head, but I know there’s something critical that is not, and it will come back to bite me (though not too hard, hopefully). Actually, on the first day I left the Raytheon facility with my security badge, which I was supposed to turn in. I was scolded the second day as the only person who had done so. Oops.

The more important part of training, though, is getting to know some of the workers who I’ll be spending the next 5 months with. Through a Herculean effort, I’ve actually managed to remember [almost] all the names of people I’ve met, as well as bits of information about all of them. This is unheard of. I’m pleased at my ability to mingle with people and chat, as I always seem to labor when it comes to things to talk about. But there’s no shortage of subjects here: where you’re from, what your job will be, if you’ve ever been down before. I am doing my best to internalize all the things the people are saying and that I overhear in nearby conversations. It’s that internalization that will allow for things to discuss in the future, and what I tend to struggle with.

Denver International Airport – 12 hours

People are scurrying up and down the terminal. There has to be around 1000 people an hour going by, each with a destination on their mind. A fellow Antarctic traveler summed it up well as we were riding the walkway to our gate: “I forget there’s so many other people with lives just as crazy as mine.” This may have been his first time at a major airport, but he’s right, and I have simply grown accustomed to the ease and seeming un-exceptionalness of traversing hundreds or thousands of miles – to new places, cultures, worlds – in a matter of hours. It is crazy, though.

Somewhere over the Pacific – 20-some hours

It has been a nice flight thusfar. I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides while eating an enjoyable – though clearly airline – dinner and drinking wine. I chatted with my seatmate, John, who has a glorious mustache which needs only a little wax to become a handlebar. His job is related to the drinking water on McMurdo, and, while it will be his first summer in McMurdo, he had spent the 2010 winter there. After talking, I then slept for awhile. It wasn’t a great sleep, but it wasn’t terrible either. I suppose it was as good a sleep as one can hope to get flying on an airplane.

I woke an indeterminate time later. It was dark both in the plane and outside. We’d left at around midnight and were presently retreating from the dawn, the first hints of which could be seen out the window to the rear of the plane. From my window seat on the left side of the plane I had a perfect view of the southern sky. On the horizon, the Milky Way rose perpendicularly and was lost somewhere above the plane. I tried for some time to identify constellations, but I am a stranger to these stars. But because of the prominence of the Milky Way, I knew the heart of the galaxy must be just out of my sight, and since I was looking southerly, it had to be above me and not below the horizon. Scorpius, Sagittarius and Libra were there, but something silly like the plane’s ceiling blocked my view. I wonder if ever there will be commercial airlines with transparent (or transparentable) ceilings and floors. Anyway, I was able to estimate that the plane was flying at around -15 degrees latitude, an estimate I will check when I get wifi again (based on the islands we are near). (Correct answer: -14 degrees)

Auckland Airport – 31 hours

As it was in Ireland, I am disoriented riding in a bus on the left side of the road. It’s a confusion that I quickly grow accustomed to, however. I wonder if it’s a similar correcting mechanism that the brain does when it’s presented with an upside-down view of the world?

I’m wondering, while riding on the bus, about how to interact with the driver when I get off. If this were the States, I would say ‘Thank you, sir’ as I get off. But here it strikes me as too formal. So I’m wondering about ‘mate.’ Do New Zealanders even say mate? Would it be appropriate to say ‘Thank you, mate’ to the driver? I stick with ‘sir’ this time, but I hope ‘mate’ is common parlance here. It’s much more friendly. I find it telling that we don’t really have an equivalent in the States. Yes, some people might say ‘thank you, friend,’ but they are few, and likely to be looked at funny. Under certain circumstances, if you are a certain type of person, you might say ‘Thanks, dude,’ or ‘man,’ but it seems to lack the politeness you might want to have. For the most part, we only have ‘Thank you,’ regardless of how warmly we mean it.

Christchurch – 40 hours

It’s colder in Christchurch. For the first time in a long time I can see my breath as I walk down the streets. When I began, I had to suppress my shivering despite having on a fleece jacket. Now that I’ve been walking for a while, I am pleasantly comfortable, even with the fine mist of drizzle that’s begun to fall.

I can’t decide if the city seems foreign to me. On the one hand, it’s undeniably different than towns and cities in the U.S., but on the other hand I do not feel out of place. As such, I am finding it difficult to take many pictures: when everything you see has a certain familiarity to it, what’s the point? It’s the things that are different that draw my attention, the things that are unique.

The damage caused by the February earthquake can be seen everywhere, but it’s subtle: barricades around structurally unsound buildings, awkward indentations in houses where brick chimneys used to be, crocked spires on churches. Normally, our hotels would be in the central district, but they say it’s still a mess down there, so we’ve been scattered into the surrounding suburbs. I love the room I’ve gotten: it is small, but not cramped. I’d call it delightfully efficient, especially after the monstrosity of a room I had in Denver.

 

And we’re off

3:00 PM MST

We’ve been airborne for a little over 20 minutes now. I am 20 minutes into something completely different. The Frontier plane spent the first 10 climbing out of Tucson and weaving around the thunderheads that were growing into, perhaps, one last late-season monsoon. We passed eye level by one that seemed to be no more than a hundred feet away. It was dark, cavernous and wholly engulfing of the view. An instant later, Tucson was visible again.

It’s not clear to me how much I am aware of the significance of my departure. I don’t know if I’ve already accepted it, with the realization unfolding gradually over the course of weeks or if there’s still a moment that is waiting to hit me. All I know is that as we sat on the runway, I was admiring the Tucson view with the Catalinas rising in the background, and there really wasn’t anything I was wishing or wanting. Was it perfect? No, it was bittersweet. But maybe that’s what made it satisfying. This is life: interesting, fleeting, experiential, changing.

I’ve been musing lately over a specific point of this Antarctic expedition: Will I get it? Will I arrive there, acclimate, take measure of it and think ‘I get it’? Obviously I hope I will. And I wouldn’t be going if it didn’t think I will. But no one goes there thinking otherwise, yet plenty of people end up not getting it. Instead, they end up miserable, overwhelmed or disenchanted.  I suppose such people don’t get it because it does not turn out to be what they expected, and they cannot accept it for what it is. I don’t know exactly what to expect, but I’m excited to find out. I hope that whatever I find, I accept for what it is. If I can do that, then I will get it.

9:00 PM MDT

Although lack of preparedness left me scrambling to figure out where I was supposed to go once I got off the plane in Denver, I eventually found my way to the proper shuttle pick-up point… and only 10 seconds or so after the shuttle had pulled away from the curb. No matter, another would be along in about a half hour, and I met my first fellow traveler to Antarctica. Short, friendly, and of an indiscernable age, Sandra was also a first timer, heading down two weeks behind her husband who had already arrived in McMurdo for his training. With their children fully grown, they decided to start a new adventure after 20-odd years of working in Denali Park, Alaska.

Sandra and I were joined by an affable man named Bob, perhaps in his early 50’s, who looked kind of like Burt Reynolds. He was a well-seasoned veteran of McMurdo who – small world – also was a shuttle driver. Sounds like I have myself a mentor! He was definitely a character: outgoing, filled with stories he was eager to share, and a few degrees off-axis. Bob introduced us to Sussie, another veteran, and we had ourselves a little gang. On the shuttle ride to our hotel, Sussie and Sandra talked in the back; Bob struck up a genial conversation with a hapless woman in the front who had no affiliation with us, McMurdo or Raytheon; and I was in the middle with an older man with wondrous facial hair named Bill. I think our conversation was the most forced of the three going on simultaneously, but it was by no means unpleasant… I just don’t think either of us were natural talkers.

Fast forward to dinner… Sandra, Bob, Sussie and myself were joined by second-year returner about my age named Kristen. Now, I get an absolute kick out of ‘small world’ coincidences. There’s something about seemingly defying the odds of interaction in a world with 6 billion people that makes me unusually excited (whether or not there is actually a low probability that’s been overcome is immaterial, it’s the appearance that I like). I had such an interaction last week in Sonoita with Erin when we were wine-tasting, and we came across a retired gentleman on vacation with his wife and friends who had attended CMU 50 years before me. So I was blown away to discover that Kristen had just flown in from Philadelphia. No, not that part, the following part.

“Do you live near Philadelphia?” I ask, “I grew up around there.”

“Outside of it aways. Where did you live?”

Not expecting her to have any idea where I’m referring I say “Souderton.”

But her eyes grew big, and it was instantly clear that not only did she know of it, she knew of it very, very well. Turned out she’s living in Harleysville, but more impressively she graduated from my high school the year after me. She didn’t recognize my name, and I didn’t recognize hers, but her boyfriend, already on the ice, had graduated a year after her and had a name that was vaguely familiar. Regardless, there are a ton of old connections to be had there, and I think such a coincidence my first day out is not only a good omen but also really, really cool.